Why I Booked a Hotel Room for the Weekend

After Coleridge.


It started with a fever and ended with a random drug search.

The start: Evidently, being exhausted can lead to other misfortunes, such as having a fever and a headache for the better part of a week, but there's nothing "better" about it, aside from the hot toddies, recommended highly by a new friend. Through a haze, I orchestrated a small presentation, involving a female-shaped portal and some sort of rodeo. I don't remember much. There was macaroni and cheese and delicious cake for dessert. My brain buzzed with activity and DayQuil.

On a separate day, let's call it the Thursday following, I wised-up and asked a silly question: "How am I doing?" That's when the collar tightened just a little bit. The answer was terrifying. I snarled, but only for a moment, and then I whimpered and understood. Shapes and figures, numbers and codes were as much a part of my programing as words. The template is rough, but that's what grad school is for. Weaknesses -- even if they are clinical and sterile, blossoming from the certainty of diagnoses -- are just challenges, invisible little steps. I don't need procedure and law to protect me when I have these bootstraps, which come in handy for pullin' myself up. Obviously. And when I scampered to my vehicle, which I had parked ten minutes before it was permitted, I was surprised to discover that, lo and behold, it was time to receive my first parking ticket. 3:50 PM is nowhere near 4:00 PM. I should've known better, but then again, numbers allude me.

Finally, I reached my destination. My emotions were threadbare, but I knew I'd be OK. Friends helped. Samuel Adams helped. And three short hours later, I was on my merry way. I didn't hear the sirens behind me, because I'm slightly hard of hearing, and also because, as the children proclaim, the jams were cranked. It had been seven years or thereabouts since a policeman had pulled me over. At that time, I was a sprightly college miss in a 1993 Ford Taurus. Tonight, I was a puffy 28-year-old in a 1996 Chevy Beretta, that was missing a front license plate. That was why he pulled me over, this gentleman who resembled a blond Matthew Broderick, only younger and, dare I say it, shorter. When I rolled my window down, however, he saw that I needed more anxiety in my life, so he told me that he would like to perform a random drug check, during which he asked me thrice if I possessed any weed. I have never touched weed, because I'm milquetoast, a stiff shirt, a square, and Matthew Broderick did not know it. He searched my vehicle. He did not find anything. He complimented me on how friendly and cooperative I was. It was because, as the children sometimes say, I am a dork.

And those are the reasons why I booked a hotel room for the weekend. No metaphorical collars, no numbers, no coppers -- just me, and maybe Samuel Adams.